Preface to the North Star & Golden-Age Arctic Homeland Musical essay series:

The Nostalgia For A Lost Paradise or Golden Age in the Archaic Myth of the New Year

Given that the Gypsy Scholar’s current musical essay series, “The Shamanic Journey to the North Pole Star & the Golden-Age Arctic Homeland,” is a logical transition from the previous musical essay series, “The New Year & Rebirth In Archaic Myth & Ritual,” the following quotations from Prof. Mircea Eliade (the scholar used to convey the information about archaic New Year mythico-ritual in the previous musical essay series) are provided here in order to help listeners put the Gypsy Scholar’s current musical essay series in the broader context of the myth of a Lost Paradise or Golden Age.

If it is probable that the intuition of the “Year” as a cycle is at the bottom of the idea of a Cosmos that periodically renews itself, in the mythico-ritual New Year scenarios another idea, an idea different in origin and structure, is discernible. It is the idea of the “perfection of the beginnings,” the expression of a more intimate and deeper religious experience, nourished by the imaginal memory of a “Lost Paradise,” of a state of bliss that preceded the present human condition. It is possible that the mythico-ritual New Year scenario has played such an important role in the history of humanity principally because, by ensuring renewal of the Cosmos, it also offered the hope that the bliss of the “beginnings” could be recovered.

At the commencement as at the end of the religious history of humanity, we find again the same nostalgia for Paradise. If we take account of the fact that this nostalgia for Paradise was similarly discernible in the general religious conduct men in the archaic societies, we are justified in supposing that the mythical remembrance of a non‑historical happiness has haunted humanity from the moment when man first became aware of his situation in the Cosmos.

This is the reason why the periodical renewal of the World has been the most frequent mythico ritual scenario in the religious history of humanity. . . . the Cosmos may be renewed ab integro, [again and again] and that this renovation involves not only the “salvation” of the World, but also the return of the paradisaical stage of existence, characterized by an abundance of food obtained without toil. Man once felt himself mystically at one with the Cosmos and knew that the Cosmos renews itself periodically; but he knew also that the renewal may be effected by the ritual repetition of the cosmogony, performed either annually (scenario of the New Year), or on the occasion of cosmic crises (drought, epidemics, etc.); or of historical events (installation of a new king, etc.). In the final instance, the religious man comes to feel himself responsible for the renewal of the World. . . . Archaic ritual reactualized the mythical illud tempus (“the time of the beginning”) of Paradise, of primordial plenitude.

Everything that we know about the mythical memories of “paradise” confronts us, on the contrary, with the image of an ideal humanity enjoying a beatitude and spiritual plenitude forever unrealizable in the present state of “fallen man.” In fact, the myths of many peoples allude to a very distant epoch when men knew neither death nor toil nor suffering and had a bountiful supply of food merely for the taking. In illo tempore, the gods descended to earth and mingled with men; for their part, men could easily mount to heaven. As the result of a ritual fault, communications between heaven and earth were interrupted and the gods withdrew to the highest heavens. Since then, men must work for their food and are no longer immortal. Hence it is more probable that the desire felt by the man of traditional societies to refuse history, and to confine himself to an indefinite repetition of archetypes, testifies to his thirst for the real and his terror of “losing” himself by letting himself be overwhelmed by the meaninglessness of profane existence. We have referred to the mythological basis of New Year celebrations, and of the festivities that mark any “new beginning”; in which we can discern anew the nostalgia for a renewal, the yearning for the world to be renovated; that one might enter upon a new History, in a world reborn; that is, created afresh. It would be easy to multiply instances. The myth of the lost paradise still survives in the images of a paradisiac island or a land of innocence; a privileged land where laws are abolished and Time stands still. For it is important to underline this fact that it is, above all, by analyzing the attitude of the modern man towards Time that we can penetrate the disguises of his mythological behavior. We must never forget that one of the essential functions of the myth is its provision of an opening into the Great Time, a periodic re entry into Time primordial. This is shown by a tendency to a neglect of the present time, of what is called the “historic moment”.

In this respect, the mystical experience of primitives is equivalent to a journey back to the origins, a regression into the mythical time of the Paradise lost. For the shaman in ecstasy, this present world, our fallen world—which, according to modem terminology, is under the laws of Time and of History—is done away with.